[R-sig-Geo] algorthirm to join polygons based on population properties

[James Rooney]

Dear all,

I have dataset with very many more polygons than cases. I wish to apply Bayesian smoothing to areal disease rates, however I have too many polygons and need a smart way to combine them so that there are less overall polygons.
Bascially I need to only combine polygons of similar population density and it would be best if the new polygons have a distribution of total population that was within a limited range/normally distributed.

I can of course come up with some way of doing this myself, but I'm not keen to reinvent the wheel and so I am wondering - are there any smart algorithms already out there for doing this kind of thing ?

Thanks,
James